Over the last few decades, the focus on migration has widened beyond a narrow preoccupation with integration – a positive development. However, while issues of migration and development, migration and securitisation, migration and climate change, and migration and gender are all relevant, something is conspicuously absent from the debate – the relationship between migration and the spread of democracy.

This case of realpolitik recalls one of the darker moments in recent EU history. In 2010, Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi used the growing number of refugees and migrants in his country as weapons of mass migration as he threatened the vision of a “black Europe”. In response, the EU supplied him with billions of dollars and border patrol technology, despite widespread reports of abuse in the Libyan camps.

Clearly, migration and democracy promotion can have a negative correlation. The relationship between liberalism and racism has historically been “a hell of a love affair”.

An analysis of legal records from 22 countries between 1790 and 2010 suggests democracies are often leaders in promoting racist policy while undemocratic countries are among the first to outlaw discrimination. This was certainly the case in the US when 26 state governors declared they would not accept Syrian refugees (or only Christian refugees from Syria) after the Paris terror attacks.

Syrian refugees gather outside a railway station in Budapest in 2015. Mstyslav Chernov

While this paints a bleak picture of the migration-democracy nexus, it is worthwhile to move from a state-centric perspective to one that puts the migrants themselves into focus.

Democracy is more than mere institutions and regular elections; it depends on the diffuse support of the population. With migrant numbers steadily increasing, their attitudes and actions can influence the democratic development of countries affected. This is especially so where there are large and constant flows of people, as between Mexico and the US.

To spread democratic values, we must share them

The Eurocentric assumption is that migrants move from authoritarian countries to established democracies of the West. There they “learn democracy” and then can act as agents of democratisation upon their return.

However, contrary to common discourses in the US and Europe, many of the world’s migration flows are not headed towards Western democracies. The Gulf states, for example, are major destinations. The temporary migrants working there often come from more democratic countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia or India.

Even when migrants are moving to more democratic countries, no automatic processes of democratic diffusion take place. The actual “blessings” of democracy may be out of reach for the majority of migrants, particularly if their status is irregular. Their treatment may be at odds with democratic values and principles.

It follows that, in the destination country, other spaces for exercising democratic participation and individual freedom outside the system of government may be more significant in influencing migrant attitudes.

Filipino migrant workers in Hong Kong are able to be part of an international union. Wikipedia Commons

This explains why returning Filipino migrants from Hong Kong show the highest support for democratic principles. That’s unsurprising when the comparison is to those returning to the Philippines from Saudi Arabia, but it also applies to the comparison with returnees from democracies such as Japan or Taiwan.

The Filipino migrants in Hong Kong are predominantly domestic workers. They have no genuine prospect of ever gaining the right to abode, but they have access to legal recourse and enjoy freedoms such as freedom of speech and the right to organise and form unions.

There is an obvious policy lesson here: if destination countries want to support migrants as agents of development, they have to treat them according to democratic values and provide them with opportunities for participation. Surely it isn’t too far-fetched to claim that if migrants are to promote democratic principles and practices back home, it is beneficial for them to experience these first-hand.

The challenges of diaspora politics

Migrants can influence the democratisation process in their country of origin without necessarily returning. While communicating with friends and family back home they report their personal experiences with democratic practices like unionisation.

More directly, they may seek to directly influence their homelands by engaging in what has come to be known as “diaspora politics”. This can be economic, social or political in nature, though every engagement can ultimately have political implications.

For example, the Mexican Tres por Uno (Three for One) program has been widely praised. For every peso sent home by migrants as remittances, the federal, state and municipal governments add one peso each.

Though this seems like a good incentive at first sight, it has some problematic implications. When private money determines the direction of public spending, an intensification of the inequalities between communities with higher and lower numbers of migrants abroad could result.

The political implications are more obvious in the case of absentee voting. Migrant communities – those from the Dominican Republic, for instance – have fought for their right to vote overseas. While these campaigns succeeded, the actual voter turnout remained quite low.

One dilemma is whether migrants should be allowed to influence policies through their votes without having to bear the consequences. The Philippines tried to resolve this issue by making a planned return in the foreseeable future a requirement for absentee voting, but this faces practical problems.

Other countries like Italy go even further and reserve a certain number of seats in their parliaments for citizens residing abroad. Again, this regulation might clash with the “all affected” principle, since the election outcome might not directly affect these voters.

To complicate things further, people with dual citizenship might be able to vote in two countries and thus weaken the “one (wo)man, one vote” principle. This might also happen on the supranational level: a well-known German journalist of Italian origin voted in both countries during the last European Parliament election and was fined as a result.

It goes both ways

Mobility thus challenges democratic principles that rely on the concept of nation-states as “containers” with an assumed congruence of territorial, social and political space.

Is it time for a new conception of rights without citizenship? Metropolico.org/flickr

Perhaps, then, the answer lies in decoupling citizenship and democratic rights. Instead of treating citizenship status as a membership card to an exclusive club, what if some membership benefits could be granted without formal citizenship after a prolonged stay?

Benefits could include the right to vote (at least on the municipal level), labour rights and the right to form and join migrants’ rights organisations and trade unions. These unions could be transnational in scope, encompassing countries of origin and destination.

If migrants are exposed to democratic principles and freedoms even without the VIP card of citizenship, they could have the real potential to become global “agents of democratisation”.

2 weeks agoby sydneydemocracyProfessor Baogang He, Alfred Deakin Professor, Chair in International Relations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University and Professor John Keane interrogate authoritarianism and democracy at ACRI UTS

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A closer look at the way politics has changed
Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two

Event Details

A closer look at the way politics has changed

Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two leading scholars to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Authoritarian populist parties have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Across Europe, their average share of the vote in parliamentary elections remains limited but it has more than doubled since the 1960s and their share of seats tripled. Even small parties can still exert tremendous ‘blackmail’ pressure on governments and change the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP’s role in catalyzing Brexit.

The danger is that populism undermines public confidence in the legitimacy of liberal democracy while authoritarianism actively corrodes its principles and practices. It also increases the resolve of authoritarian regimes around the world. This public forum sets out to explain the growth and character of these regimes and the polarisation over the cultural cleavage dividing social liberals and social conservatives in the electorates, and how these differences of values translate into support for authoritarian-populist parties and leaders in the U.S. and Europe, and elsewhere. The forum highlights the dangers to liberal democracy arising from these developments and what could be done to mitigate the risks.

This event brings together Professor Pippa Norris and Professor John Keane to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Professor Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Professor John Keane will discuss his new book When trees fall, monkeys scatter.

The Speakers:

Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Pippa is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for more than a quarter century. She is ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. Her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. She is ranked the 4th most cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google scholar. Major honors include, amongst others, the Skytte prize, the Karl Deutsch award, and the Sir Isaiah Berlin award. Her current work focuses on a major research project, www.electoralintegrityproject.com, established in 2012 and also a new book with Ronald Inglehart “Cultural Backlash” analyzing support for populist-authoritarianism.

John Keane will discuss his new book When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: rethinking democracy in China. He is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and Distinguished Professor at Peking University. He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. He is the Director and co-founder of the Sydney Democracy Network. He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper’s, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post. His online column ‘Democracy field notes’ appears regularly in the London, Cambridge- and Melbourne­-based The Conversation. Among his best-known books are the best-selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and MediaDecadence (2013) and the highly acclaimed full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). His most recent books are A Short History of the Future of Elections (2016) and When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017), and he is now completing a new book on the global spread of despotism.

Event Details

Speaker: Professor Gerry Stoker, University of Southampton
Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this

Event Details

Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this seminar Gerry Stoker explains how and why anti-political sentiment has grown among British citizens over the last half-century drawing on research about to be published in a Cambridge University Press book co-authored with Nick Clarke, Will Jennings and Jonathan Moss. The book offers a range of conceptual developments to help explore how citizens think about politics and the issue of negativity towards politics and uses responses to public opinion surveys alongside a unique data source-the diaries, reports and letters collected by Mass Observation. The book reveals that anti-politics has grown in scope and intensity when seen through the lens of a long view of the issue stretching back over multiple decades. Such growth is explained by citizens’ changing images of ‘the good politician’ and changing modes of political interaction between politicians and citizens. The seminar will conclude by placing these findings in a broader comparative context and exploring the implications for efforts to reform and improve democratic politics.

Chair: Dr Thomas Wynter

Discussant: Professor Ariadne Vromen

Time

(Tuesday) 11:45 am - 1:30 pm

Location

Room 276

Merewether Building, University of Sydney http://sydney.edu.au/arts/about/maps.shtml?locationID=[[H04]]

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Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against

Event Details

Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine State causing more than 650,000 Rohingyas to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous “war on drugs” has claimed more than 12,000 victims, predominantly the urban poor, including children. And the Cambodian government’s broad political crackdown in 2017 targeting the political opposition, independent media and human rights groups has effectively extinguished the country’s flickering democratic system at the expense of basic rights.

Australia’s 2017 White Paper includes the goals of “promoting an open, inclusive and prosperous Indo–Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected” as well as the need to protect and promote the international rules based order. So what role does Australia play in addressing these problems and what more could the Australian government be doing?

To discuss these matters, we are delighted to welcome Elaine Pearson.

Elaine Pearson is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch. Based in Sydney, she works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. She regularly briefs journalists, politicians and government officials, appears on television and radio programs, testifies before parliamentary committees and speaks at public events. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division based in New York.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Elaine worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She is an expert on migration and human trafficking issues and sits on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Pearson holds degrees in law and arts from Australia’s Murdoch University and obtained her Master’s degree in public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She writes frequently for publications including Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way they emerge out of ecclesiastical institutions and practices. However, I will suggest that Foucault’s contribution to political theology in a sense turns the paradigm on its head and signals a radical departure from the Schmittian model.

Foucault does not seek to sanctify power and authority in modernity, but rather to disrupt their functioning and consistency by identifying their hidden origins, unmasking their contingency and indeterminacy, and bringing before our gaze historical alternatives. Furthermore, Foucault introduces to the debate around political theology something that was entirely missing from it – the idea of the subject. The notion of the ‘confessing subject’ – the individual who, from earliest Christian times, has been taught to confess his secrets and thus form a truth about himself – is central to Foucault’s concerns, as are the ethical strategies through which the subject might constitute himself in alternative ways that allow a greater degree of autonomy. And while in the past, religious institutions and practices, particularly the Christian pastorate, have sought to render the subject obedient and governable, at other times, including in modernity, religious ideas have been a source of disobedience, revolt and what Foucault calls ‘counter-conducts’. It is here that I will develop the idea of ‘political spirituality’, showing how this notion can operate as a radical counter-point to political theology.

About the speaker:

Saul Newman is Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and currently a Visiting Professor at the Sydney Democracy Network. His research is in continental political thought and contemporary political theory. Mostly known for his research on postanarchism, he also works on questions of sovereignty, human rights, as well as on the thought of the nineteenth century German individualist anarchist, Max Stirner. His most recent work is on political theology and post-secular politics, and he has a new book forthcoming with Polity called Political Theology: a Critical Introduction.

Time

(Thursday) 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

Seminar Room 498

Merewether Building, University of Sydney

Organizer

Department of Government and International Relationsmadeleine.pill@sydney.edu.au